What are we doing?
Introduction
Music has been around since the history of mankind. However, where most of today’s music tends to be used for personal entertainment, it was often used to give praise to deities. But are there any musicological properties of a piece of music that make it specifically suitable for religious purpouses? Bach himself sometimes re-used his ‘pagan’ music for religious purposes and vice versa giving an important role to lyrics. However, we also know that Bach was a master in the writing of baroque affective music, indicating a carefull use of pitch, volume, tibre, and time for bringing music to it’s purposes. So, even if there is some overlap between musical sound of pagan en religious music, there might be some aspects which fit just better for one of them.
Method
To be able to answer the research question one has to compare religious music with non-religious music. This is implemented in R using the spotifyr module which gathers data from two types of playlists: religious and non-religious. Both corpuses are more usefull for machine learning purposes, as for example classification, if they contain many songs. Therefore, a set of different playlists which tend to be typically religious or non-religious has been made. Depending on the results, the religious playlists could be split up further to detect if there are any difference between different religions. Differences are measured between contemporary music lists but could be further expanded to more classical oriented music. Both sets are mostly biased with so called top-songs.
Data, data, data.
| Title | ID | Songs |
|---|---|---|
| Religious | 1Lfv5hpiBqtxHIlaeUo8TS | 44 |
| Top Christian Contemporary | 37i9dQZF1DWUileP28ODwg | 58 |
| Top Christian | 37i9dQZF1DXcb6CQIjdqKy | 66 |
| Christian Playlist for 2017 | 5t4HnPlX51s5ZdC2Lucnyz | 391 |
| Islamic / Nasheeds | 1dNteyophghoFsbO3lCULn | 67 |
| Islamic Song | 3SxT23r9nc6M1Ew2xrVpaV | 108 |
| Islamic Songs | 1YVnT9OowJP6ayM5QRazW7 | 120 |
| Sanskrit / Hindu Mantra Chants | 6RLNAQJoR5OUAl5lyA8YJJ | 133 |
| Fusion Hinduism | 5lNmoVhBqIY0zKcZH3RZlr | 53 |
| Buddhist Meditation Songs | 3c4AduB9UOrxkfdW0Nh2hA | 270 |
| BUDISTA | 1aBpY65gFEM88trlD8Beht | 238 |
| Top Jewish Music | 05Um5tgwbBWNAikYlwCId6 | 255 |
| Jewish Music - Driving | 1m0HB9PIDiovCDtO4qc00l | 402 |
| Title | ID | Songs |
|---|---|---|
| Non Religious | 4VuiQ0wD6Xh5uDYveV2b0C | 183 |
| Non Religious 3 | 0B6Lj8siocfyTOCzyeBYzX | 59 |
| Top 2017 | 1DoUPHRIAC6YbEPiDf8IOd | 99 |
| Today's Top Hits | 37i9dQZF1DXcBWIGoYBM5M | 50 |
| TOP 2019 | 208tdAvqyrtssZFKLktwkx | 43 |
| Top Tracks of 2018 | 37i9dQZF1DX1HUbZS4LEyL | 100 |
| Top of the Charts | 7b2rMhQyuX3vkgQz2umhdV | 107 |
| Top allertijden | 1nwCwjYUStN0xvoSmSgS9M | 785 |
| 2019 Hits | 4JkkvMpVl4lSioqQjeAL0q | 128 |
These tables should eventually be merged.
We have got a total of 2105 unique religious songs, which means there are exactly 127 doubles in the set. [1]
The non-religious list makes up a total of 1565 unique non-religious songs, suprisingly enough there are no doubles here. [1]
Notice that it is hard to tell whether all these top-songs are really non-religous.
[1] Using the distinct function from R.
Look at that!
Thes plots should be merged
These visualisations show the spread of each musical variable. De cirle with cross shows where the mean lies. There are already some interesting findings visible like the difference in danceability of religious and non religious music. On average religious music is less danceable but more acoustic compared to non-religious music. Speechiness and duration are quite the same with exceptions to many outliers. On most properties Religious music has a very wide spread. Tempo is the same on average, however there is more spread in religious music.
Religions?
Arousal Valence Plane
I spend a couple of hours making this interactive but unfortunately my laptop did not like it once saved as a .html
On the arousal-valence plane religious and non-religious music have kind of the same spread, however there is a big difference for individual religions. Buddhistic music tends to be quite sleepy while most Jewish music tends to be very happy. Christian and Islamic music have a wider spread like non-religious music, where the former is in the more angry corner of the plane. The different musical modes do not have much influence on the emotional placement. These results point to a research direction which focuses more on different aspects of music of different religions. For now it seems that there is indeed a difference between religious and non-religious music. However it might also be that the differences are just the result of comparing western music with non-western music. To test that hypothesis Christian and Islamic songs have to be compared more thoroughly with the non-religious data set.
Chroma
outlier
ID: 6vTKEeFj64bTEbuhYi4Cdn
Let’s inspect the Buddhistic outlier from the religons tab. This song has a very high valence combined with a very low energy. This piece does not seem to have a primary key, however there is some kind of pattern visible.